1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to font substitution. More particularly, it is directed to substituting fonts of string characters within computing environments.
2. Description of the Related Art
In modern computing, the transfer of documents or files between computer systems is a common occurrence. For instance, electronic mail messages (“emails”) as well as email attachments (e.g., additional files or documents) are transferred between various users of the Internet and World Wide Web. In another example, documents and/or files are transferred between computer systems via a local area network (LAN) or via physical memory medium (e.g., compact disc or flash memory). In many cases, documents transferred between computer systems contain text or text-based information. To facilitate the rendering and display of text, formatting information is typically provided within documents that contain textual information. One type of formatting information includes fonts. Fonts may include a set of glyphs, each of which may represent the shape of various characters (e.g., graphemes, numerals, symbols, and/or punctuation marks). Fonts may have different styles, which may be reflected in the shape of each font's constituent glyphs. The style of a particular glyph is typically similar to the style of another glyph of the same font.
Typically, computer systems have multiple installed fonts. In some cases, such fonts are installed automatically during the installation of an operating system. In other cases, fonts are installed with particular software applications, such as word processing applications, desktop publishing applications, and other applications configured to display or format text. In yet other cases, fonts may be individually installed by a user or system administrator. Whether a particular computer system can display textual information according to a particular font may depend on whether such font is installed on the particular computer system. In some cases, a set of fonts installed on one computer system may be different than a set of fonts installed on another computer system. Accordingly, while one computer system may be able to correctly display text according to a particular font, another computer system that has a different set of installed fonts may not be able to correctly display the text according to the particular font.